


Let's Talk About... The Counterintuitive Nature of Quantum Superpositions

by Nevcolleil



Series: Let's Talk [3]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Phone Sex, Pre-Season/Series 01, That Isn't (Yet?)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 13:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17489261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: Jack hasn't forgotten that calling Angus wassupposedto be a distraction. It's just not a beneficial memory for Jack to have when he knows that if he calls up Angus he can feel, for just a bit, like everything in his life isn't a bloody struggle or a bald-faced lie. Jack never has to lie to Angus. He knows Jack's real name and uses it fondly when they talk.That means a lot. Too much, probably.





	Let's Talk About... The Counterintuitive Nature of Quantum Superpositions

**Author's Note:**

> This will likely make no sense unless you've read the last two short parts of this series :p And I've been away from the story for a while, so hopefully it doesnt feel disjointed. Either way, here is more of my Jack-calls-a-sex-line-look-who-takes-his-call fic. Except it's starting to morph into something more than that...

This is the way things continue for a while: Jack calls Angus's phone sex line, he tells Dispatch Lady (Frankie, Angus tells him eventually, making Jack feel silly for having imagined Frankie - the last time Angus mentioned her - to be a big, scary-looking dude Angus had to toe the line not to piss off, like some kind of pi-) that he wants to talk to Aaron and he'll wait for the privelege to do so if needed. Only Jack doesn't have to wait again, either because his timing is so lucky or he's just that predictable. (He always calls around the same time. He manages to restrain himself from ever calling two nights in a row, but he never goes more than three nights between calls - four, tops, but that time he'd been stuck in a Lithuanian prison, so. Not Jack's choice.) 

They talk about almost everything. They watch movies together. Sometimes Angus reads Jack excerpts out of this brainy book he thinks is funny. It amuses him so much that his voice quivers on every other word, and he has to struggle to get through some of the "punchlines". Jack doesn't understand half of what Angus is saying, but he laughs until his eyes water just listening to Angus crack up. 

One night Jack's missing his old man especially bad, and he has a few (ten) too many beers before getting on the phone. Jack reads Angus the poem his niece wrote about her grandpa when he died, and Angus doesn't sound awkward or like he pities Jack or something, afterwards - like he thinks Jack's continued grief is childish or pathetic. He sounds just as choked up as Jack is as he says that little Jennie's poem is beautiful. He sounds like he means it.

For six weeks, Jack calls Angus's phone sex line and does just about anything but have phone sex. He flirts, he teases... he enjoys Angus's awkward but earnest attempts to flirt and tease him back _immensely_. He jacks off now and then, after they've hung up, remembering a voice and picturing a face he made up in his head. (Okay. Maybe more than just "now and then"). But somehow Jack never feels quite right taking Angus up on it when the kid asks, haltingly, if Jack really wouldn't rather be getting _more_ out of his phone calls.

After two months have passed since Jack saw an ad and called a stranger and said yes - yes, please - he'd like to talk to a man, Angus gets weird during their call. He almost sounds... nervous to Jack. Distracted the way someone gets when they're really listening to you, they are, but they've got something to say to you, too, and they're waiting for the right time or for some inspiration as to how to say it.

Jack picks up on it and immediately assumes the worst. 

Do phone sex operators ever break up with their customers? Would Angus do that? He's always seemed to-

Okay, so, again - Jack is a fool who pays a pretty young man on a sex line not to have phone sex with him, and he's probably too dumb to know what he's talking about when it comes to this... But Angus has always seemed, as far as Jack can tell, to enjoy their conversations. The sexy and the "anti-sexy" parts. He still isnt charging Jack half of what Jack owes him, and that's got to mean something, right?

Jack gets more proof that it does when Angus finally says - as Jack starts to chicken out of giving Angus the chance to tell him he'd rather spend his time talking to guys he doesn't feel too sorry for to charge a full price - that, yeah, he could use an early night too, so they can hang up earlier than usual but-

"Uh... would you mind not calling this number the next time you want to talk to me?" Angus asks, and Jack feels his heart plummet into his stomach.

"I mean, okay, that's not how I meant to-" Angus follows up quickly. "I meant, can you call me on a different number?"

"What?" is Jack's brilliant response.

"You could- You could still reach me whenever you want... I mean, if I'm not in class or something, same as before, " Angus explains. "But you wouldn't have to go through Frankie or-"

"What, like on a separate line?"

Angus pauses. "Yeah, it's- It's a private number. I could give it to you, that way you wouldnt get charged every time you call. "

"So... it would be like a monthly service kind of thing?" Jack asks, trying to figure out what exactly Angus is offering him, because in a way it almost sounds like- But Jack's a fool; he's not a complete idiot. "You do that?"

Angus pauses again, longer this time, so that for a moment Jack feels just as out of place as he had the first time he'd called in - totally ignorant of how any of this works. And speaking of different words for stupid, Jack is definitely one, because he knows that there's no reason to feel self-conscious about being otherwise absolutely inexperienced when it comes to paying people for sexual contact, not when it comes to Angus. When they first met, Angus was just as inexperienced with taking these calls as Jack was with making them. (Not that Jack thinks often - or ever - about what experience Angus may have gained since then.) Angus will chuckle at Jack, tell him that yes, everybody in this business has a private line for "preferred clients", or something similar that they can giggle over like that, Jack will crack a stupid joke, and then Angus will sign him up, no fuss. Angus never makes fun of Jack for anything Jack hasn't made fun of himself for first.

In fact, just now, Angus even forgoes chuckling at him and joking good-naturedly. "I do," he says quietly, like he picked up on Jack's earlier fear, as well, and is making a point of sobering his voice so that Jack doesn't mistake his offer as being anything but sincere.

Jack's heart pounds in his chest. Being offered Angus's private work number isn't the same as being offered Angus's _private_ number, obviously, but it's something. Something Jack didn't have before and that Angus doesn't have to give him. Jack didn't even know to bring it up - Angus wanted him to have it.

"I'd like that, Angus," Jack says, "What is it?"

Jack's too pleased to mind that Angus hurries off of the line pretty quick after that. He's got a new set of digits to memorize and a blush to get rid of somehow before he catches his reflection one more time and feels like punching himself in the face.

 

Jack's called Angus only a few times on his private line before a series of missions crops up to end their calls faster and spread them out farther in between.

And the entire time Jack thinks about Angus. About things Angus's said, things he'd appreciate on Jack's "travels". In New Mexico, Jack passes a range of rust-colored buttes, lit like a fire by the big yellow sun setting just behind them, and Jack remembers how Angus said that he and his grandad had taken a trip to these parts. How Angus said he's always wanted to come back - to see the deserts he'd thought had looked like an alien landscape when he was a little kid, all bright colors and flat edges and a sky that "seemed closer than it usually is." (Angus said that sounding bashful - and looking beautiful, Jack bets, with a blush of his own staining his skin. Bashful, Angus sounds like a guy who blushes.) Jack pulls over to the side of the road and takes a photo with the fancy camera he got for his mission, then stops at the next drugstore he passes and gets the picture pulled off and sent to his phone - he can't turn in his memory card with sightseeing photos on it. He texts it to Angus with a string of little alien head emojis as a caption.

In Stalingrad, Jack lives to see another day because he remembers what Angus once said about mixing vinegar and hydrogen peroxide - namely, to never, _ever_ do it (unless you _want_ to maim and or kill somebody, Jack extrapolated.) But he can't text Angus about that.

In Singapore, Jack sees a slinky kimono made out of inky black silk, embroidered all over with flowers in what must be every shade of blue that exists - some large and intricate, some tiny and delicate-looking. It's not the kind of thing Jack would have expected to remind him of a man, even one he's sort of - Jack can admit it, at least in his own head - sweet on. But when the shopkeeper notices his interest in it, and Jack manages to communicate in his broken Mandarin that he doesnt have a _Nǚ péngyǒu_ , the old man produces a nearly identical kimono that has obviously been tailored to fit a man's broad shoulders.

Jack calls Angus that night and wonders which blue would best match Angus's eyes. 

Jack asked Angus to describe himself once, and that's all he got: height and weight (meaning Angus's fit, Jack can deduce, from what Jack knows of Angus's regular schedule - he runs every morning around the MIT campus); hair color (blonde - a "light" blonde, Jack got when he pressed - which means, statistically, that Angus's got a naturally fair complexion, perfect for blushing); and eye color. Blue eye color. He teases Angus by guessing, over and over, what kind of blue til Angus sounds perfectly red-faced and admits that his eyes are probably more like "the sky after a light, sunny rain" than "the ocean if you look close enough to the horizon", laughing and criticizing Jack's flare for the dramatic. 

Jack doesn't tell Angus that he bought that damned robe and is imaging, in this moment, dressing Angus in it.

 

Jack hasn't forgotten that calling Angus was _supposed_ to be a distraction. A way to take his mind off of real things and a holdover until he can get back on his feet from how Sarah knocked him on his ass.

He's not supposed to be spending more "real" time thinking about Angus when he's off the phone than he does not thinking while he and Angus are in the middle of a call. He's not supposed to prioritize their calls and apologize when he can't make one "on time". Jack shouldn't be acting - shouldn't even Iet himself pretend - like a steady pay schedule isn't the only reason Angus even knows he's alive, no matter how much the guy might like (appear to like?) talking to Jack as well.

Jack's certainly not supposed to be sending Angus one-sided texts just to make the man happy, or buying him gifts that can't be sent. Jack may not know fuck all about sex work, but he sure as hell knows _that_.

It's just not a beneficial memory for Jack to have when he knows that if he calls up Angus he can feel, for just a bit, like everything in his life isn't a bloody struggle or a bald-faced lie. Angus asks Jack all kinds of things that a person who's interested, a person who cares, would ask. He asks how Jack's Mama's handling the dry summer Texas is having, and if his neighbor's kid is still being a little punk about leaving his skateboard in the stairwell.

But he's never pressured Jack to tell him what Jack does for a living, or where Jack is at any given moment, so Jack never has to lie to him. He knows Jack's real name and uses it fondly when they talk.

That means a lot. Too much, probably.

Too much for Jack to do the smart thing, when he stumbles through the Bangladeshian equivalent of a seedy no-tell motel room, collapses onto the cot in the corner, and dials Angus's number one-handed, fumbling his phone between his shoulder and ear before reaching for what's left of his gear.

Angus picks up after six rings, just when Jack is about ready to sob in his defeat.

"H'lo," Angus mumbles , in a sleep-heavy voice that Jack's never heard from him, even after all of their latenight calls.

Amped up on adrenaline, shaky from blood loss, Jack still somehow finds himself smiling at the sound - a little manically, perhaps. But Jack _did_ take a gunshot tonight, one that is still bleeding profusely, and 'manic' is feeling like the only alternative to 'unconscious' for Jack right now, so he'll take it.

"Hey, Angus, listen," Jack jumps right into it, trying to keep as much of the strain that he can hear in his own voice from carrying over the tinny cell connection as possible. "I know this is going to sound really weird... Heh. Look at me. This is _always_ weird, am I right? I know it is. But what I'm gonna ask you now is going to sound even weirder than usual..."

"Jack?" Angus asks, maybe because he's confused by Jack's urgent tone or unusual greeting - maybe because he's still trying to wake up well enough to determine whether Jack is in fact calling him at God-knows-what-time-this-is. 

Either way, Jack can't spare him much time to catch up, so Jack silently promises to make it up to Angus later. If there _is_ a later for Jack.

"I'm gonna mute this call and put you on speakerphone alright? I promise it's just you and me on the call, and all I want is to listen to you talk at me. Anything you wanna talk about, okay?" Jack says quickly, half expecting Angus to tell him to go to hell, to ask more questions, or to just hang up. "I just need you to keep talking and not mind if you don't hear from me for a little while, alright, baby?"

Jack says it like a question, but he doesn't actually wait for Angus to answer. He says, "Okay, here we go," before the urge to scream becomes too much, and fumbles the phone off his shoulder, hitting the mute and the speakerphone commands with blood-slick fingers before dropping the phone on the cot at his side.

He does it just in time to let out a loud groan and sink one fist into the drywall at his _other_ side. The extra boost of adrenaline that lashing out gives him helps Jack hold off on passing out that much longer. Then he gets to the messy work of replacing the dirty strip of torn fabric he'd been using as a tourniquet for his leg with his much firmer belt. He hisses through digging out the kit in his bag with the supplies he'll need to sew himself up long enough to make it to exfil, uses the bottle of rice wine that had been sitting on the floor by the cot to flush out the wound with a shout, and takes out the knife he's got to use to dig out the bullet lodged in his upper thigh before it can cause him any more trouble.

All the while, Jack keeps half of his attention on Angus. On that slightly husky Midwestern voice and the clipped tone Angus always falls into when he's really into talking out the technical details of whatever he's explaining to Jack, be it microcarbon test ratios or charged ion laser inscription.

At first, Angus was just quiet. Then he did just as Jack said and began to talk. Jack can tell, once he's got his leg re-tourniquetted and can notice, that Angus has been thrown off by Jack's peculiar request and the nature of this strange call. He's talking about something he and Jack have discussed at least once before, he's talking more quickly than usual - too quickly for Jack to keep up, honestly, even though he already knows what Angus is talking about. Angus sounds shaky, and he pauses now and then seemingly for no reason, even repeats himself from time to time.

"-exist as a combination of multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes..., " Angus is saying when he pauses again, this time following up his pause with a careful, "Jack?"

"Fuck!" Jack has cursed involuntarily. The bullet does _not_ want to come out of him. He's seriously weighing his chances of getting to where he needs to go if he just sews himself up with the bullet still inside - hoping that his movements don't cause it to shift around far enough to hit an artery.

And then Angus says, "Did you just say you're trying to remove a _bullet_ from your body? "

Apparently, Jack hadn't hit the mute button on his phone as successfully as he'd hit the speakerphone option. And Angus has heard every sound Jack's made this whole time.

Fuck it. 

Jack doesn't _sob_ , but he does tear up a little, maybe, over how incredibly fucked up everything has become...

And he doesn't even bother trying to do damage control and explain away what Angus has heard and maybe deduced from everything.

"Yeah," Jack admits, after his own pause, "but I lost half my kit a kilo back. I'm playing doctor with a frickin Bowie knife over here, I've got no tweezers, no clamps. I've got a needle, some fishing wire, and some cheap ass rice wine."

Maybe (probably) Angus will want nothing to do with Jack after this - he's a smart dude. But then again, maybe his being so smart might actually save Jack's life. Jack doubts that MIT teaches courses in medical field dressing, but perhaps Angus can give him the math to speculate how the bullet will move if Jack- 

"Pepper," Angus says immediately.

" _Huh_?" Jack barks, surprised, in response.

"Do you have any black pepper?" Angus asks. And then, as if he's afraid Jack's passed out instead of just being stumped silent, he shouts, " _Jack_! Jack, do you have any-"

"Wait, yeah," Jack finally answers, snapping out of it.

"Pepper is an excellent coagulent," Angus is saying as Jack drags himself off the cot and to his feet well enough to lurch towards the dresser he'd half tipped over in front of the hotel room door when he'd come in, just in case he'd been followed. The remains of the stakeout lunch he'd brought back to the room with him yesterday are still in the plastic bag hanging off of one corner of the dresser, including several packets of black pepper.

Behind Jack, from the cot, Angus's voice continues. "You probably don't want to suture over it once you've poured the pepper into your wound, but it should slow residual bleeding, and maybe it will make digging the bullet out easier so you can walk on your leg without the bullet slipping in deeper."

Jack retrieves the pepper packets, and collapses back on the cot with them, breathing heavily from the exertion.

" _Pepper_?" he asks, "seriously? " Even though Jack's already ripping packets open with one hand and his teeth and stacking the open packets upon his other palm.

"Or there's a filament threaded along one side of most RF printed circuitboards that can be removed from your phone and bent into a decent pair of tweezers," Angus is saying, like he counsels gunshot victims through self-treatment over the phone every day - only that continuing waver in his voice betraying how off-put and probably freaked out he's feeling.

"Yeah, no, pepper it is," Jack says, having opened the last packet.

"I've never actually seen anyone try this," Angus is warning him, even as Jack prepares to upend all of the packets above his wound, "but I'm sure it probably hurts like-"

Jack dumps all of the pepper into the hole he's turned into more of a gash in his leg and cuts Angus off with a scream.

Jack sincerely _hopes_ that this is the Bangladeshian equivalent of a no-tell motel.

Chances of that are good at least , it seems, as Jack blacks out for a moment and there's no one at his poorly barricaded door or even banging on the hotel room's thin walls when he comes to. 

There's just Jack's phone, which has slid down the cot's stiff mattress to rest against Jack's head where it drooped when Jack tipped over and passed out.

Through it, Jack can still hear Angus's voice. 

"-sorry. Jack, I'm sorry," he seems to be saying over and over, when he isn't trying to rouse Jack or ask Jack where he could send help if he disconnected and called 911.

That last thing makes Jack chuckle, even as he groans with the pain of sitting back up and prodding at his wound once more.

"Well, I'll be damned," he says. "Nothing to be sorry for, Angus. The pepper's working. Holy shit."

It also makes digging for the bullet hurt a fuck ton more the second time around, but at least with the pepper drying up the wound a bit, Jack is actually able to dig the bullet out - at long last - with the tip of his knife.

After that, Jack bandages the wound with strips of his own t-shirt. And he's got a good ten minutes to sit, woozily catching his breath, and contemplate just how awkward of an awkward silence the silence that has fallen between him and Angus actually is, before he has to get back out there and make his way towards his exfil.

"So..." Jack begins. "Would you have believed me if I'd ever told you I was a bathroom tile salesman?" he asks.

Angus actually laughs.

It's a half-hysterical sounding laugh, followed by a soft curse Angus obviously says with his phone pulled away from his ear in an attempt to keep Jack from hearing him, but Jack figures that's fair.

"A gun-fighting bathroom tile salesman?" Angus asks when he brings the phone back.

"Who got mugged?" Jack tries.

"No," Angus says, so firmly that Jack's certain he's about to hear a dial tone and then never have the privelege of speaking to Angus again.

And then Angus says, still shaky but otherwise sounding entirely too normal for Jack to believe his good fortune, "I've listened to you complain five separate times about your grandmother's bathroom tile."

"It cracks every time the house shifts!" Jack insists. 

"Because the tile guy didn't float any of it," Angus recites like-

Okay, so maybe Jack's complained about the issue sort of a lot. 

"It's a fifty-year-old farmhouse, man," Jack can't help but remind. "It's on posts older than I am! Everybody knows you gotta float your tile when you got a shifting foundation. That's common knowledge."

So is the fact that slurred speech isn't a great sign from someone's whose just been shot. Especially when he's got a bitch of a walk ahead of him to catch his flight out of this nightmare.

Jack drops his attempt at a jovial tone and faces facts. 

He also makes clear a couple of facts for Angus. Just in case Jack doesn't have the privelege of speaking to him ever again, for one reason or another.

"Well, the point is, Angus, I never told you that. I never told you anything that wasn't true," Jack says, letting himself feel, for just a moment, the significance of that fact without qualifying it.

"You never had to tell me anything," Angus says quietly.

And the words sting surprisingly bad considering Jack has six packets of seasoning stuffed inside of a bloody gash in his thigh.

But then Angus adds, "But I... I'm really glad that you did, Jack."

Jack stares at the phone as if he can see whether or not the voice coming out of it really is as sincere as it sounds.

The phone doesn't sit up and stare back at him, or anything equally impossible, so Jack doesn't think he's gone delirious.

"Hey?"

"Yeah?"

"Promise me you'll call back as soon as you're safe."

Jack stares a moment more, and then he smiles. "I'll do that," he promises. "Just as soon as I'm back in the States."

"Thank you," Angus responds, sounding genuinely relieved. And then: "Wait, _what_? Jack, what do you mean _back-_ "

Jack's already hung up. He's got an exfil to catch. And despite the burn and the pull he feels just standing...

He's feeling surprisingly hopeful about making his flight in good time.


End file.
